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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6176927" data-attributes="member: 37579">In a<a href="http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20130819" target="_blank"> Legend & Lore column</a> a few weeks back Mike Mearls made the claim of players:You aren't edition warriors. You want the game to support a variety play styles in equal measure. You're not attached to any specific ways of doing things as long as the game works. Now, this doesn't match the forums, but it does suggest we're a curious minority here. But I still believe the statement is accurate. I'm a pretty strong 3e fan and was a bit of a anti-4e troll at the start of the edition. But i still ran a 4e game for two years, and played in two games (plus some Encounters). Because that's what people were playing. But how do we reconcile the idea that players - as a collective whole - are not edition warriors and will play what works with the reality that many groups never upgraded from earlier editons or left 4e for Pathfinder?I believe there must be a swing vote. In a group full of indiferent people who don't care what they play so long as they play, there must be one or two players with a firm opinion that drive the choice.This would most likely be the one also providing the books, the participant most invested in the hobby. More often than not, this is the DM. It's an interesting idea. DMs drive the hobby despite being outnumbered 4:1. But they're the ones that have to actually run the games, so if they're not having fun or don't enjoy the edition then it is going to be very hard for everyone else to enjoy themselves.This actually explains some of the blowback from 4th Edition. The lore changes hurt DMs the most, by altering worlds. Any DM who had an established campaign world - either homebrew or published - suddenly had to revise everything to account for the new races, classes, planes, monsters, and the like. The bulk of the mechanics and content were also aimed at PCs, with no use for DMs. Unlike 3e, where DMs could at least use feats and classes with monsters, there was no reason to buy any of the ____ Power books.4th Edition, like 3e, was a player's game with the power in the hands of the characters. The game was so designed to avoid bad DMs that good DMs lost a little authority. Everything was codified. Curiously, 4e was touted as being easier to DM. So how does this theory mesh with that claim?I often found 4e's claimed easier DMing not to be the case. Building encounters was trickier as I couldn't just pull a single monster from a book but had to pull 4-8 and see if their powers synergized and also think of the terrain in the encounter area and provide a map for the encounter and each fight had to be a big setpiece fight. You couldn't just have a quick filler encounter to act as a break between long stretches of roleplaying, or small mood building encounter.Monster building was somewhat easier. Kinda. While there was far, far less math involved making a 4e monster also involved writing two to five unique powers. The math was annoying and slow, but brainstorming unique snowflake power could be even slower. Having designed quite a few monsters, eventually your brain just starts to shut down.Often DMing was easier, often it was not. So at best I'd call this a tie. I wonder if this is the potential appeal of D&D Next. More power and focus on the DM. A DM's game, because they're the swing vote that will drive up sales. This ended up much longer than planned. I might expand it into a blog... Thoughts? Comments? Am I dead on, full of poop, or somewhere in the middle?</blockquote>

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